Summary: December 2013, Typeradio held a two day workshop in cooperation with Indra Kupferschmid and 10 students of the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste (HBK Saar) in Saarbrücken, Germany. Each student was assigned a typeface, designed by a Dutch designer, along with the assignment: ‘translate the typeface into a one minute sound piece’. The resulting 10 sound pieces were the starting point of another workshop, in collaboration with Jan Willem Stas and the students of the Type]Media 2014 typography master coarse in The Hague, The Netherlands. Each T]M student was handed an (anonymously labelled) sound piece and their challenge was to ‘create a typeface concept inspired by the sound’. The results were quite surprising! 1) Original typeface: Macula by Jacques le Bailly 2) Sound piece by Aileen Dietrich & Laura Müller 3) Chinese whispered typeface by T]M group This looping sound, featuring a palindrome played forwards and backwards, conjured ideas of letters that could be read forwards and backwards, as well as the concept of infinity. The Type]Media group set out to draw letters that contained two versions of themselves conjoined on top, one rotated 180 degrees. Text set in this typeface can thus be read from both sides — a unique feature specifically designed for settings of palindromic text. To emphasize the theme of infinity, endlessness or continuous motion, we constructed each letter out of a single continuous line. This solution was truly a group effort: The initial ideas and sketches were developed together and the file was passed around allowing communal contributions and editing.
